Neuroimaging Support for Discrete Neural Correlates of Basic Emotions: A Voxel-based Meta-analysis

Abstract

What is the basic structure of emotional experience and how is it represented in the human brain? One highly influential theory, discrete basic emotions, proposes a limited set of basic emotions such as happiness and fear, which are characterized by unique physiological and neural profiles. Although many studies using diverse methods have linked particular brain structures with specific basic emotions, evidence from individual neuroimaging studies and from neuroimaging meta-analyses has been inconclusive regarding whether basic emotions are associated with both consistent and discriminable regional brain activations. We revisited this question, using activation likelihood estimation (ALE), which allows spatially sensitive, voxelwise statistical comparison of results from multiple studies. In addition, we examined substantially more studies than previous meta-analyses. The ALE meta-analysis yielded results consistent with basic emotion theory. Each of the emotions examined (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness) was characterized by consistent neural correlates across studies, as defined by reliable correlations with regional brain activations. In addition, the activation patterns associated with each emotion were discrete (discriminable from the other emotions in pairwise contrasts) and overlapped substantially with structure-function correspondences identified using other approaches, providing converging evidence that discrete basic emotions have consistent and discriminable neural correlates. Complementing prior studies that have demonstrated neural correlates for the affective dimensions of arousal and valence, the current meta-analysis results indicate that the key elements of basic emotion views are reflected in neural correlates identified by neuroimaging studies.

Hidden sources of joy, fear, and sadness: Explicit versus implicit neural processing of musical emotions

“…Furthermore, music clips expressing negative emotions, namely sadness and fear, recruited the left medial frontal gyrus and the left anterior cingulate cortex more than happy music. Activity in the medial frontal gyrus has been observed previously in association with sad music, mainly played in minor mode Khalfa et al, 2005;Vytal & Hamann, 2010). The anterior cingulate finding replicates what has been obtained in previous studies on negative music emotions, particularly sadness, both in music (Green et al, 2008) and also in other domains, as showed in a meta-analysis of 83 studies on discrete emotions (Vytal & Hamann, 2010).…”

“…This area has consistently been associated with emotion processing (Kober et al, 2008;Lindquist et al, 2012;Phan et al, 2002;Vytal & Hamann, 2010), also in the music domain (Khalfa et al, 2005). The cluster overlapped bilaterally with a cluster found by Williams et al (2006) during the explicit processing of fearful faces.…”

A survey of affective brain computer interfaces: principles, state-of-the-art, and challenges

“…[38] With regard to affect, and specifically for emotions, the notion of discrete emotions is closely related to the faculty approach. Each emotion can be mapped to a specific set of brain structures: fear can be related to the activation of the amygdala, disgust to that of the insula, ventral prefrontal cortex, and amygdala, sadness to that of the medial prefrontal cortex, anger to that of the orbitofrontal cortex, and happiness to the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (see [39] for a fMRI meta-study supporting the faculty view). Figure 3 gives an overview of these structures.…”

Is a neutral expression also a neutral stimulus? A study with functional magnetic resonance

“…However, different meta-analytic reviews of the relevant emotion neuroimaging literature have reached somewhat different conclusions regarding which specific neural networks are associated with each basic emotion (Phan et al, 2002;Murphy et al, 2003;Fusar-Poli et al, 2009a, b;Vytal and Hamann, 2010).…”